Sunday, May 1, 2016

Ancient Roman Statues in 16th-century Engravings

Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny rely heavily on 16th-century Roman engravings to help establish dates of discovery and display of the ancient statues they write about in Taste and the Antique (Yale University Press, 1981). It was in Haskell and Penny that I found a list of early Roman engravers who made pictures of ancient Roman statues. These are among the earliest recorded states of display. Curators at the British Museum believe the engraving above was the earliest print made of the Laocoön group, unearthed in Rome in 1506. "The engraving shows it reversed, before the restoration of the right arm."

The Belvedere Torso would not from the image above be easily recognized by anyone who knows it – because it appears here with added legs and feet, plus lion skin. Giovanni Antonio da Brescia made the engraving when the Torso was kept either at Palazzo Colonna or in another private residence. A few years later when the Pope brought it to the Vatican, the Torso no longer possessed limbs. "When in the Vatican, it was at first described (and drawn) as lying flat on the ground, but it seems to have been mounted on a a base, in a seated position, soon afterwards. ... Though the Torso was highly esteemed from at least the early sixteenth century, as can be seen from the number of drawings that have survived and from other evidence, there can be no doubt that thereafter its great fame depended closely on the admiration that Michelangelo was said to have expressed for it; and this admiration must have been well known to connoisseurs even before Aldrovandi published it to the world in 1556 during the artist's lifetime. ... Equally significant was the fact that the Torso was left unrestored. Michelangelo, who failed to 'finish' so many of his own sculptures, may well have played a part in this decision.""There have been only rare exceptions to the praise given to the Torso. On Stendhal 'it produced no real effect. We recognized that this was the piece of marble so admired by Michelangelo and by Raphael who reproduced it in the torso of the Eternal Father in his "Vision of Ezekial"; we studied it like something from China, but it aroused neither pain nor pleasure.' More characteristic was the verdict of the archaeologist Raoul-Rochette, writing a few years later, who maintained that the Torso was 'perhaps the only one of all the masterpieces of ancient art that have come down to us which has lost none of its reputation since the appearance of the sculptures of Phidias which have driven down into the second rank everything which had previously been admired.""The Torso is cataloged as the work of an eclectic artist of great virtuosity of the first century BC, reflecting a conception of the third century BC." (quotations from Haskell & Penny)

The Apollo Belvedere appears in two engravings above shortly after Pope Julius II added it to the Vatican collections in 1509, assigning it the Belvedere courtyard. The subsequent worldwide praise of this statue fills many volumes. Schiller said that no mere mortal could describe "this celestial mixture of accessibility and severity, benevolence and gravity, majesty and mildness." Winckelmann adored this work, convincing himself that Nero had moved it to Rome from Greece (so as to accounted for its pure Greek style). Others with the same wish to back-date the sculpture were equally sure that the Emperor Augustus had brought it home from Apollo's shrine at Delphi. Then came science in the 19th century indicating that the marble composing the statue was Italian, not Greek. And that was the beginning of the end. Soon enough, it came to be reluctantly accepted that the Apollo Belvedere was a Roman copy, modified from some unknown lost Greek bronze model. As other examples have shown, the statues with the most exalted reputations were the most vulnerable to a plunge in prestige once that terrible word c-o-p-y had been heard.

We looked at the Belvedere Cleopatra previously, as it appeared in Perrier's book of plates in 1638. The early version (above) by Marcantonio Raimondi, after a drawing by Raphael, is less a documentary record and more a free adaptation of the statue, representing the sleeping or dying queen as existing somewhere between the realms of marble and flesh.

The Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius was the largest bronze to survive above-ground in Rome from the time of antiquity. It would undoubtedly have been melted down in early Christian times – like countless other "lost" bronzes – if it had not been incorrectly identified as the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, and superstitiously venerated for that reason. When the engravings above were made in the early 16th century, the statue still stood near the Lateran palace, where it had remained since at least the Middle Ages. Michelangelo designed a new marble base and made this work the focal point of his new design for a piazza on the Capitoline Hill. And there the Pope moved it in the 1560s, although officials at the Lateran continued to protest about this appropriation for more than a century.

Marco da RavennaSpinario
ca. 1510-27
engravingBritish Museum

Diana ScultoriSpinario
1581
engravingBritish Museum

The Spinario (above) and the Capitoline Hercules (below) were celebrated, first and foremost, for their rarity as ancient bronzes that escaped destruction. The Spinario had sat for as long as anyone could remember on a column outside the Lateran Palace, near the Equestrian Marcus Aurelius, and was transferred to the Capitol along with the larger bronze during the same reorganization."The Spinario has always been admired," according to Haskell and Penny, "but contradictory themes may be detected in the descriptions of it: the subject was a shepherd boy but a heroic story was attached to him; the easy naturalism of the unstudied pose was appreciated, but some, looking at the head, found in it a certain archaic stiffness and Rubens in his treatment of the theme changed the head completely. During the last century the status of the sculpture has been enormously disputed. Other antique versions in marble have been discovered which are Hellenistic inventions with nothing archaic about the head and it has been proposed that the Spinario is a pastiche of the late Republican or early Imperial period in which the naturalism of this Hellenistic prototype is made more piquant by the addition of a head copied (or, possibly, literally taken) from an earlier Greek statue."

Diana ScultoriCapitoline Hercules
1581
engravingBritish Museum

The Capitoline Hercules emerged from under the Roman earth at the end of the 15th century. "This statue was always very famous, but although it was sometimes warmly admired its celebrity depended more on its distinction as a large and relatively intact bronze than on its own aesthetic merit. ... Most guidebooks stress its importance and the feelings of wonder that it should arouse in the visitor. Visitors themselves, however, tended to be rather more reserved. They singled out the statue, but in neutral, descriptive terms."Over the centuries it was never engraved or copied as often as its peers, and it disappeared with less struggle from public imagination than many of the other beloved Roman statues degraded during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Diana ScultoriFarnese Bull 1581engravingBritish Museum

The Farnese Bull, with other colossal marbles, emerged from an excavation at the Baths of Caracalla in the mid-16th century – "a bull, three handmaidens and a shepherd carved out of a single piece of marble." The Farnese Pope, Paul III, claimed the discovery for Palazzo Farnese, where it was elaborately restored and quickly put on display.

The phrase"mountain of marble" appears in much of the descriptive writing about this group – a phrase that could be used with equal effectiveness either to admire or disparage. Winckelmann once again attempted to argue that the work was 'Greek' – and was once again posthumously contradicted. Labels of the present day describe the Farnese Bull as a Roman creation, probably copied from a Greek original, but in an "enlarged and elaborated version, specially made for the Baths of Caracalla in the early third century AD."
The final two engravings are also from the early 16th century – a great period for the consolidation and display of sculpture collections in Rome. These designs are attributed to Agostino Veneziano in collaboration with scholars and antiquaries – to illustrate their understanding of ancient Roman styles of sculpture display.

attributed to Agostino VenezianoStatue of Cupid in niche
(display design)
early 16th century
engravingBritish Museum

attributed to Agostino VenezianoStatue of Jupiter in an aedicule of the Temple of Jupiterearly 16th centuryengravingBritish Museum

COMRADES OF TIME

"Hesitation with regard to the modern projects mainly has to do with a growing disbelief in their promises. Classical modernity believed in the ability of the future to realize the promises of past and present – even after the death of God, even after the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul. The notion of a permanent art collection says it all: archive, library and museum promised secular permanency, a material infinitude that substituted for the religious promise of resurrection and eternal life. During the period of modernity, the 'body of work' replaced the soul as the potentially immortal part of the Self. . . . But today, this promise of an infinite future holding the results of our work has lost its plausibility. Museums have become the sites of temporary exhibitions rather than spaces for permanent collections. The future is ever newly planned – the permanent change of cultural trends and fashions makes any promise of a stable future for an artwork or a political project improbable."

– Borys Groys, Comrades of Time, 2009

"I study only what I like; I occupy my mind only with the ideas that interest me. They may or may not prove useful, either to me or to others. Time either will or it will not bring about the circumstances that will lead me to a profitable employment of my acquisitions. In any case I will have had the inestimable advantage of not having been at odds with myself, and of having obeyed the promptings of my own mind and character."

– from Products of the Perfected Civilization: selected writings of Chamfort, edited and translated by W.S. Merwin (1969)